Grandma offmychest

I have never been close to my Grandma. I remember going to her house when I was a child. She always kept oatmeal cream pies in a cookie jar, which we were never allowed to have at our own house. She grew up in the Great Depression, and she saved everything. We would ask for "bug jars" and she would fetch emptied and washed peanut butter jars from the cabinet and poke holes in the lid for us. She lived in the country, and we would fill those jars with grasshoppers, praying mantis, and toads as we went on adventures in the crop fields and creeks that surrounded her manufactured home in Spencer County, Indiana. Sometimes, my brother and I would stay the night and sleep on a rolled out, twin-sized egg crate mattresses on the floor in her living room. It always smelled like animals in her house - cats and dogs. She watched Hee Haw and the news, and that was it. She had photo albums and books full of crochet patterns.

My Pappaw, who I'd never known as much of anything but debilitated and sick, wheezed himself away in a recliner, sipping a drink from a bendy straw and watching us, a prisoner in his decaying body. I would sit on his lap, and he would call me Glo-Bug and talk to me about slicing bananas faster than I could eat them when I was an infant. My Grandma would dress his wounds every night, unpacking and repacking the gaping hole in his armpit. She showed it to me once - the layer of thin skin between his beating heart and the outside world. I still don't know exactly what happened to him, but I know it wasn't fair.

My Pappaw died when I was nine. I never got to really know the man he was, but I miss him all the time. I whispered in his ear that it was okay for him to go as he lay dying in a hospital bed, and sometimes I feel like a hero for that. I know my Grandma had many dreams of traveling around the country with him... and I know that life was very hard and lonely for her after he died....

My Grandma's health began to decline about three years ago. She was working two days a week at the General Store that my mom and I were running, and I could see the change. She slowly started becoming more nervous, more distracted. She was depressed and anxious - down on life... expecting the end. Of course, I supported her and tried to talk her through her worries...

About two years ago, we had to take her car away. We had heard from the neighbors she was swerving up and down the highway... we had been in the car while she drove recklessly the twenty miles between the General Store and town. And one day, we got the call that she had driven off the road and her car had flipped into a ditch. We took her keys away a week later and she hated us for it. From that point onward, she slowly devolved into an even more anxious, depressed, and eventually agoraphobic person. We couldn't pry her from her home. We couldn't get her to the doctor. She lost weight, she lost her mind...

No one wanted to address it and it continued. She was alive, surviving in her own little world, texting and calling every contact in her phone 24/7 until they blocked her, worrying around her dirty home, refrigerator full of decaying food and yard full of growing weeds, until it was finally too much. My mother scheduled an appointment with Home Instead after she sustained an injury while walking around in the yard with her dogs. What if she had knocked herself out and frozen to death?

My mother arrived the morning of the evaluation and told my Grandma that someone was coming to assess the situation. She flipped. She beat on my mother... she tried to stab her with a kitchen knife, and my mother called dispatch for help. A sheriff came and called the hospital. Two EMTs wrestled my Grandma... kicking, biting, and screaming.... into an ambulance. She is now admitted in a Psych Ward in a neighboring county awaiting evaluation. I, in the meantime, have been caring for her two dogs - a Border Collie named Mimi, and a Coon Dog named Lucky. They are depressed... sad... confused... and it is a constant reminder of what is going on. Lucky lays, whining, at this very moment, wondering where his ward is. Mimi looks up at me with big, brown eyes, wondering the same. I sit here, typing out this story, and I wonder if it makes any difference at all... just another story in a sea of stories... but I had to get it off my chest. Thanks for reading.

Submitted February 06, 2017 at 03:45AM by mintlydisturbed http://ift.tt/2kHTqjw offmychest